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Category Archives: spies

Thanks to Edward Snowden and journalists at Der Spiegel, today we learned about Tailored Access Operations (TAO), NSA’s world-class hacking team. There was a lot of interesting information in that article (like how they divert shipping of electronics to a secret warehouse where they can modify it to install backdoors!).

But I’m just going to talk about how they use Microsoft error reports to gather private information about Windows computers that can be used to compromise their security — a problem that’s trivially easy for Microsoft to fix.

You might have read today’s shocking Guardian and New York Times articles outlining the many ways that NSA and GCHQ have defeated crypto on the Internet, and have influenced tech companies to insert back doors into their commercial security products.

But pay close attention to this paragraph in Guardian’s article:

The agencies have not yet cracked all encryption technologies, however, the documents suggest. Snowden appeared to confirm this during a live Q&A with Guardian readers in June. “Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on,” he said before warning that NSA can frequently find ways around it as a result of weak security on the computers at either end of the communication.

Giving up and deciding that privacy is dead is counterproductive. We need to stop using commercial crypto. We need to make sure that free software crypto gets serious security and usability audits.

If we do this right we can still have privacy in the 21st century. If we give up on security because of this we will definitely lose.